TABLE TALK
Something New by Mathew Block
“Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” (Isaiah 43:19).
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or those sitting in exile, the prospect of something new was the answer to decades of prayer. They had waited to be saved for so long. Jerusalem had been razed. The Israelites were carried off as captives to the land of Babylon. And this was no short stay either; the Prophet Jeremiah tells us it would last for seventy years (Jeremiah 29:10). These things came about, we learn in Scripture, as a judgment from God. And even the Israelites saw the judgement as just, though it was bitter: “The Lord is in the right, for I have rebelled against His Word,” the Book of Lamentations says, “but hear, all you peoples, and see my suffering; my young women and my young men have gone into captivity” (1:18) The grief is palpable—and it would last for generations. But at length, God promised, He would return His people to Jerusalem. “I will visit you,” God says, “and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place” (Jeremiah 29:10). The fulfillment of this promise is the “new thing” to which God is referring in our passage above: “Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” Judgment will pass, He is saying; exile will end. “I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert,” God declares (43:19). “I, I am He who blots out your transgressions for my own sake,
and I will not remember your sins” (Isaiah 43:25). These are words of transformation; God is taking one thing and forming it into another. He takes the baren desert and fills it with water. He takes an unpassable wasteland and makes a road. He takes a people justly punished for sin and restores them in mercy. This is the way of our God. He takes that which is broken and makes it new. He takes that which is small and makes it great. He is a God of new things, a God of miracles. He speaks into the void, and the world begins. He takes dust in hand, and man is created. He enters a tomb, and eternal life is won. Nor are such miracles a thing of the past. You see them in your own midst. The Word of Christ is spoken, and simple water becomes a flood of forgiveness. The Testament in His blood is proclaimed, and bread and wine are invested with the true presence of His body and blood. His promise of mercy is announced, and the sinful are made righteous. The Church is itself one of these “new things” which God has made. For we, like the Israelites before us, were exiles of a sort, sinners estranged from God. But through Jesus, He has made us His own. “Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people,” St. Peter writes. “Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy” (1 Peter 2:10). Though we were lowly, God makes us into something new—His own children. And we were indeed lowly: “For consider your calling, brothers,” St. Paul writes. “Not many of you were
wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are” (1 Corinthians 1:26-28). God makes something new of that which is lowly and despised. So it is that our God could take an instrument of torture, the cross, and make it a symbol of purest love. What lowlier thing could He embrace? What shame more despised could He make His own? And yet, O Christ, what wonder have You wrought for us here—peace, forgiveness, and life everlasting? Ye s , o u r G o d i s a G o d o f transformation. In this issue, we reflect on that theme in several ways. We are reminded that even evil can be changed, through God’s power, into a source of good for His people (page six). We consider how the challenges of the pandemic afford new avenues for the proclamation of the Gospel online (page nine). And we reflect on the solemnity of Lent, waiting for it to become at length the Alleluia of Easter (page 42). God grant us faith to wait in patience for the “new things” He has yet to reveal—for the transformations He will accomplish among us in this age, as well as in the age to come. “And He that sat upon the throne said, ‘Behold, I make all things new...’” (Revelation 21:5)
THE CANADIAN LUTHERAN January/February 2021
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